1884.] VAEIOUS VIEWS OF FARMING. 223 



stable and spread it requires nearly a whole day for man and 

 team. The help are all boarded in the house. Two barrels of 

 flour are kneaded into bread dough every four weeks; a peck of 

 beans, all carefully picked over by hand, is just enough for a 

 baking. The barns are large, and are annually crowded with hay, 

 and the grain bins are equally full. There is a dairy, and there 

 are little children growing up to be loved and educated, and the 

 strength of this mother's hands has been divided between the 

 duties of the nursery, the kitchen, the dairy, and the parlor, some- 

 times with assistance, often without. Butter and cheese have been 

 made by the ton, but thus far nearly every dollar gathered from 

 the annual sales from the farm, above what has been required for 

 paying help and clothing the family, has gone, not to diminish the 

 debt, but to pay the interest on the mortgage which covers it. 

 That discouraged wife and mother believes that all this trouble 

 comes to them from having too large a farm. I believe the diffi- 

 culty is largely due to paying high rates of interest on land that 

 is not worked up to its highest capacity. It is possible that the 

 farm is too large for the man. It is surely too large for the 

 manure, for I never knew manure to be spread very bountifully 

 where the stable and field were a mile apart. There are too many 

 acres plowed, planted, and mowed over for filling those hay-mows 

 and grain bins, and too much time is spent in traveling, at from 

 one dollar to two dollars per day. The men are too far apart to 

 be kept sufficiently under the eye of the master. But this woman 

 writes me, " My husband and his old father love every inch of 

 this old homestead farm, and it would be a hard wrench to let a 

 single rod of it pass into other hands." 



Was Thoreau very far wrong when he said, " I am wont to 

 think that men are not so much the keeper of herds as herds are 

 the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer " ? And 

 was Mr. Russell wrong when he said that the greatest fallacy about 

 New England farming is the idea that it can be profitably carried 

 on without capital ? 



I recently visited a farmer in my own county, who owns two 

 large farms, but who gets nearly all his profit from four acres set 

 to cranberry vines, and which cost him at least $500 per acre for 

 preparation before picking a single berry. The original value of 

 the land was not over $10 per acre. 



I visited another, who, a year ago, applied fertilizer for potatoes 



